On the beach with Stephen Jay

By Andrea Bottaro

Posted October 27, 2005

It doesn't take much to get some attention from the upper echelons of the
Intelligent Design movement. All you need is two things:

1. an argument against mainstream evolutionary theory, no matter how old and
stale (e.g.: "mutations are not really random", "we can tell design when we see
it", "natural selection is a tautology", "common descent is an illusion"
etc)

and

2. some sort of claim of authority to prop up that argument ("I have a PhD in
a science-related field"; "I design/engineer things for a living, so I know how
design works"; "I have written a pioneering/forthcoming/acclaimed book on the
topic"; etc).

Of all the latter kind of claims, the most bizarre I have heard is probably
the one underlying the latest post at Denyse O'Leary's blog: she believes a guy's take on
evolution and on Stephen J. Gould's ideas, because Gould used to spend time
at his beach house. Seriously.

(Please note - an update now follows the main entry)

O'Leary's source is a fellow named Stuart Pivar who, according to O'Leary, is
"a chemical engineer as well as an art collector". He apparently was a good
friend of Gould's:

"steve and ronda would spend weekends at my beach house. we were close
friends for years. i officiated at his funeral service." (S. Pivar, as quoted
in O'Leary's blog entry)

He also dabbles in evolutionary theorizing (but who doesn't these days? It
almost seems that posing as an evolution theorist has become the equivalent of
posing as a beat poet in the early '60s, or a punk rocker in the late '70s). In
fact, Pivar has written a book, titled Lifecode, in
which he apparently proposes a structuralist view of evolution. I can't comment
on the book, since I have not read it, but the illustrations look cool. Mr.
Pivar has also set up a web site, http://www.stephenjgould.org/, in which he claims to take over
the mantle of the late Dr. Gould against - who else? - the evil Darwinist
orthodoxy.

OK, so Mr. Pivar is an eclectic spirit, a bit of an eccentric, perhaps with a
tendency to self-aggrandizement, but nothing wrong there. Alas, judging from his
site, his knowledge of evolutionary biology, and of Gould's own ideas, can be
charitably called rudimentary, or perhaps just confused.

Evolution is a vital, well-supported, unifying principle of the biological
sciences, and the scientific evidence is overwhelmingly in favor of the idea
that all living things share a common ancestry. Although there are legitimate
debates about the patterns and processes of evolution, there is no serious
scientific doubt that evolution occurred or that natural selection is a major
mechanism in its occurrence. It is scientifically inappropriate and
pedagogically irresponsible for creationist pseudoscience, including but not
limited to "intelligent design," to be introduced into the science curricula
of our nation's public schools.

In particular, Pivar notes:

steve lifes work was to understand evolution. His message was that natural
selection was merely an eliminative force with no creative role, capable of
choosing for survival among preexisting forms which are produced by other
natural structural processes.(S. Pivar, as quoted in O'Leary's blog entry)

O'Leary, not new to premature triumphalisms, concludes:

If so, this is a major upset in the current intelligent design
wars that will surely damage NCSE's case for teaching Darwinism only in
American schools. [emphasis O'Leary's]

Now, Gould was certainly a strong critic of adaptationism and reflexive
selectionist approaches, but neither applies to the Steve's statement, which
clearly recognizes the role of other forces besides selection in evolution.

Never one to shy away from polemics, Gould was often criticized by other
scientists for his penchant for staking debates in rather extreme terms, and
sometimes caricaturing his opponents' positions. This trait, together with his
vast popularity with the general public, made Gould a favorite source of
misquotation by Creationists and assorted opponents of evolutionary theory (to
Gould's great annoyance).

Nevertheless, in his professional work, Gould was generally quite careful and
clear on the central and creative role of selection in evolution. In his final
book, The Structure of Evolutionary Theory, which pretty much
summarizes (eh) and organizes Gould's entire theoretical view of
evolution, he compares evolutionary theory to a branch of coral, in which
fundamental theoretical concepts are organized along the axis: a main basal
trunk representing agency (the theory of natural selection at the
organismal level as the "causal locus" of evolution), is followed by the two
upper branches efficacy ("selection acts as the primary creative force
in building evolutionary novelties") and scope ("microevolutionary
modes and processes can, by extrapolation through the vastness of geological
time, explain the full panoply of life's changes in form and diversity"). These
are in turn followed by higher branches representing, in Gould's view, secondary
aspects of the theory. Gould extends the metaphor comparing criticisms of the
theory to cuts at different levels on the coral (lower for more destructive
criticisms, higher for less consequential ones). He says:

The cut labeled K1 on Figure 1-4 [at the base of the coral - AB] would have
severed the entire coral by disproving natural selection as an evolutionary
force at all. The cut labeled K2 would have fully severed the second branch,
leaving natural selection as a legitimate cause, but denying it any creative
power, and thereby dethroning Darwinism as a major principle in explaining
life's history. (We shall see, in chapters 3-6, that such a denial of
creativity underlay the most common anti-Darwinian argument in the first
generation of debates.) The cut labeled K3 would have fully severed the third
branch, allowing that natural selection might craft some minor changes
legitimately called "creative" in a local sense, but denying that Darwin's
mechanism could be extended to explain the panoply of macroevolutionary
processes, or the actual pageant of life's history. The success of any
one of these K-cuts would have destroyed Darwinian theory, plain and simple.
None of them succeeded, and the foundation of Darwinian logic remains intact
and strong. [emphasis mine](S.J. Gould, The Structure of
Evolutionary Theory, Harvard University Press, 2002, p.20)

Gould then proceeds to describe other higher-level cuts that have modified
secondary branches of the theory, or "coral", while leaving its central tenets,
the trunk and main branches, intact. There too he says something else relevant
to the topic:

On the second branch of efficacy, the cut labeled R2 accepts the validity
of Darwin's argument for creativity (by leaving the base of the branch
intact), but introduces a sufficient weight of formalist thinking -
via renewed appreciation of the enormous importance of structural,
historical and developmental constraint in channeling the pathway of
evolution, often in very positive ways - that the pure functionalism of a
strictly Darwinian (and externalist) approach to adaptation no longer suffices
in explaining the channeling of phyletic directions, and the clumping and
inhomogeneous population of organic morphospace.(S.J. Gould, The Structure
of Evolutionary Theory, Harvard University Press, 2002, p.21)

In other words, Gould saw structuralist principles, together with the role of
contingency and developmental contraints, as applying on top of a solid
Darwinian theoretical foundation, not to supplant natural selection as a major
creative force in evolution, but to influence its outcome. This is a view
consistent with the Steves' statement, and most certainly shared, with
accommodations for varying emphasis on this or that aspect, by the vast majority
of modern biologists.

For those who have read Gould's primary scientific works this is really
nothing new, since - misunderstandings and histrionisms aside - his views on the
matter did not change very much over time (see for instance ref. 1, or the text
of his Cambridge University Tanner Lecture in 1984). Perhaps he talked
differently after a few pina coladas, who knows. However, his legacy as
a scientist should be found in his own articles and books, not on the web site
of some beach buddy, no matter how close.

References

UPDATE - 10/25/05 2:30 pm

O'Leary, who doesn't know when
to stop digging herself a hole, has returned to the topic this morning in a new post attacking Genie Scott and visibly vibrating at
uttering the word "scandal".

Mr. Pivar has apparently contacted her again, reiterating his point:

Steve Goulds life work featured the debunking of natural selection as the
cause of anything more important than the differences in the beaks of finches,
in his investigation of the causes of evolution. The Steve List is the
appropriation of his name in the propagation of a theory which he opposed his
entire life long. Every statement SJG ever made rejects natural
selection, and none can be found in its support. Is this colossal
misunderstanding innocent incompetence, or a soviet style paradigm takeover?
[emphasis mine]

Perhaps "eccentric" was too mild a term for Mr. Pivar. His claim that all of
Gould's published statements reject natural selection, and none can be found to
support it, is belied by the quotes and references I mentioned above, and by
that provided by Glen Davidson in a comment to this entry. Glen's quote is actually particularly
nice, in that by identifying natural selection as "a major cause of evolution",
is almost identical to the wording in the Steves' statement.

So far, it seems that the only scandal is Denyse O'Leary's continuing
reliance, in her commentaries about evolution, on information of dubious
credibility, rather than on widely available primary sources.